On 02/02/2013 08:06 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
On 02/01/2013 08:16 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 02/01/2013 04:52 PM, Craig White wrote:
It's clear that you want this e-mail list, informal as it is to respect
your sense of proper grammar.
No, it's not "his sense of proper grammar," it's proper grammar as
it's been taught in schools in every English speaking country for
over a century now.
As I see it, there are three reasons people's grammar on this list
falls short. This is an international list and not all of the
members have English as their first (or even second) language. My
attitude is that they're doing the best they can and as long as I can
work out what they originally meant, that's all that matters. Second,
there are native English speakers who either were never taught
properly in school (I have a friend who has trouble with homonyms,
using "flue" for "flew" and other such errors because of problems
when she was young.) And, of course, there are the people who were
exposed to proper grammar, syntax and word usage but simply don't
care. On some mailing lists, people in both of the latter two groups
would be flamed for their errors. On this one, I keep my opinions to
myself because I can't see any way it could possibly help and many
ways it could end up making trouble for everybody.
Back in the days on some IETF lists we had a Japanese professor who's
English was phenomenally good and would flame native speakers on their
grammer. Of course the gentleman could not speak a clear word of
English (and still can't when I occationally meet up with him) which
we all put up with as his genius really fixed a number of protocols
that just were not going right. There are a number of protocols you
here use all the time that we would still be reving if he had not
gotten up in a meeting and said, "here is how we should do this".
Now, of course, we're in a long, OT discussion of the issue and I
think that if nothing else, it's let all of us who don't like bad
grammar to air our opinions instead of bottling them up as we'd
normally do. No, I don't expect this to result in any change, but
who knows; somebody might decide to be more careful because they'd
never realized how it looks to others.
Of myself I have been taught English and know the proper usage of both
the present and past-participles...(LoL!) But I find that I might make
an error here and there, and I don't always spell check, so they might
get through. I realize this is not an excuse to be lazy and rely on a
spell-checker to correct my English, but some people might have no
choice but to rely on it because their English is not their first
language. And I agree with you, as long as you can get the gist of what
the person is saying or asking, you should be polite enough to not
correct their every error.
EGO II
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